Questing or My Miss Aurelia?

[Calzone Lord]

Horses like Questing who are in great form but only for a short while, and go sour always seem to get the short end of the stick in the Eclipse Awards.

I posted this Asmussen stat right before he brought Rachel Alexandra back from her layoff during the week of her 4yo debut:

Here are Asmussen's stats with layoff horses since 2004:

96-for-643 (14.9% wins) $1.22 ROI - basically you lose 2.5 times more than the takeout - or 39% on every dollar bet.. and 643 races is a big sample.


Here are Asmussen's stats with layoff routers since 2004:

17-for-159 (10.7% wins) $0.65 ROI - you're losing 67.5% on every dollar bet. An unbelievable amount.


It's pretty obvious that Asmussen has very little talent with getting horses ready off of a layoff ... I guess just look at the silly choice of workmate he choose for RA's last work - and the curious comment he made about expecting her to go 1:12 .. she'd have needed like a 21 flat final quarter to do that.

The real bright spot for RA though - is that I believe these Asmussen layoff stats become undermined in her case because Asmussen is also downright terrible 2nd off the layoff and downright terrible 3rd off of the layoff.

He's an ultimate 'strike while the irons hot' kind of trainer .. but when his horses get hurt or go sour and need time .. you can almost forget them. In RA's case - there was no injury and was no going sour.